Imran wrote:
To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything else. A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else, so *those* would always turn up. The solution? Write more articles on other topics.
kq
koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
Imran wrote:
To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything else. A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else, so *those* would always turn up. The solution? Write more articles on other topics.
At some point in between the same was happening for the "year" pages. I agree to KQ's solution to the problem cased by Ram-Man's good work. Eclecticology
On 10/26/02 12:28 PM, "koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com" koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
Imran wrote:
To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything else. A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else, so *those* would always turn up. The solution? Write more articles on other topics.
That's one of the big problem with bots--the only reasonable way to keep up with the small-town-bot entries is to use your own bots.
What are the pros and cons of the small-town bot? + Provides a good template for someone who wants to write an entry about a small town (such as [[Newton, Massachusetts]])--actually, it's a good start for any town, but entries for larger cities have mostly written - Adds thousands of entries to Wikipedia that are unlikely to see a human edit any time soon (in fact, we could probably extrapolate the nearly exact rate at which they will get edited by seeing how many have been edited so far)
Any graceful solution would provide the automatic functionality of the first without the negative consequence of the second.
One example would be there to have a reasonably limited number of pages listing all the possible towns (perhaps by state), with links. If someone clicks on that link, they have the option of importing the small-town-bot entry.
An equivalent solution is one that others have mentioned--tag the entries as "bot entries" that are marked as ? pages (or at a minimum, ! pages), aren't listed on default RecentChanges, don't appear on default RandomPage, but do show up under searches-by-name and will appear if someone clicks on a link to the entry.
When someone clicks on that link, they would get an entry clearly marked as an automated addition, with the note that if they edit it, it will be untagged.
In fact, it would make more sense for the tag not to be "bot" but "imported". People who want to hand-import entries from public/GFDL sources would use the same tag.
koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything else. A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else, so *those* would always turn up. The solution? Write more articles on other topics.
So true.
BTW, I recently read that the Encarta atlas contains 1.8 million entries. 35000 single-cow-places will vanish in the long-term expansion of wikipedia. That is, if it continues to grow as we all wish.
On Sat, 26 Oct 2002 koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
Imran wrote:
To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia:
It depends on what you mean by accurate, if you mean it returns the modal type of article then you are right, but if you are talking about the range than you're not.
Related pages turn up on random search fairly often anyway (because of the [[Birthday paradox]]), the US city articles are just going to make the situation worse.
Additionally consider how RandomPage is used,
* By people looking for interesting topics. * By people looking for pages to edit * By people who want to see the scope of wikipedia.
For the first two categories of people, if they find a page interesting they're likely to follow up links from it, if not they'll just hit randompage again. What these people don't want is to be given another article which is very similar to the article they didn't want to read, so this will put off both contributors and casual readers.
The third category will likely come away with a highly skewed view as to the kind of article in Wikipedia.
For virtually all uses of RandomPage people do not want or expect to see a series of related articles in rapid succession.
Imran
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